The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  Tawna Maydew stood beneath the tusks of the largest of three fiberglass mammoths. The paint had been blistered away by fifteen years of sun, but otherwise the statue looked as it had in so many photos. Tawna, too, did not look so different. She was still tall, still curvy, still tanned, still shaggy-haired. Perhaps she’d been here the whole time, standing, standing, standing, while Annie had been walking, walking, walking.

  Annie’s heart had perished years earlier, shaved away like rust by her own wind-sharpened ribs. But she might be confusing the heart organ with the heart concept. She felt a stirring, akin to how she’d felt seeing those stranded vehicles, collapsed bridges, drifting continents of bison. It was the feeling of mattering.

  She’d only seen Tawna Maydew in the flesh once, at a place of illusions called Disney World. This was no illusion. There she was. Standing. Moving. Tawna was lifting her arms. Tawna was walking forward.

  Tawna was entering the pit.

  Annie understood basic physics. Lake Pit was eight to ten feet deep in its center. The asphalt would roll over Tawna’s head as she progressed. The accumulated weight of it would pull her to the bottom. Annie would never see her at a closer distance, never touch her, despite the thousands of miles, the incalculable years.

  So Annie Teller entered the pit too.

  The asphalt suctioned to her bladed legs. It was worse than being snagged in the wild vines of the Arkansas Ozarks or the depths of Colorado snowdrifts. To move a leg, she had to shove aside an entire lake of tar. Her efforts created ripples that moved outward, rainbows corkscrewing the pond’s lustrous surface. Rival ripples came from Tawna’s own trudging thighs. How could she move like that, with legs of mere flesh? Annie wanted to touch those legs as others of her kind wanted meat and blood. She pushed harder. The hot tar reached her knees, her waist.

  When Annie Teller and Tawna Maydew reached each other, the asphalt was at their chests; their silent trajectory had avoided Lake Pit’s deepest area. Black oil, however, had splashed across Annie’s face, partially obscuring her good eye. Tawna, she thought, was reaching out to her. Tawna’s mouth, she thought, was making a noise that Annie, missing both ears, could not hear.

  A sound surfaced from the dry crevices of her brain—the beep her phone had made when receiving a text. It was in texts she’d first seen pictures of La Brea, usually in the background of Tawna’s sultry selfies. That’s right. Tawna lived just a street or two away. That might explain why she wasn’t in pieces. Maybe she’d kept her end of the emailed bargain, and had been waiting safely, patiently indoors.

  If the world goes gooey, we’ll meet on the banks of beautiful La Brea!

  It was as beautiful as billed. As warm and cushy as the blankets on Tawna’s bed always looked, tugging Annie toward well-earned sleep. Annie forced an arm through the black mire, found Tawna’s hand. Tawna Maydew was real.

  Annie felt Tawna’s fingers close around her wrist, unmindful of the blades. Ripples hit ripples, rainbows ate rainbows. The sun had risen, turning the asphalt gold.

  They were chest to chest. Annie’s chin struck Tawna’s. The sticky tar glued them together. That was fine. Annie did not plan on ever moving away. Tawna’s arms wrapped around her back. She returned the embrace, an achingly slow movement. She felt her right hand fall off. It did not matter. Tawna’s eyes widened, opalescent goo stretched between her lashes. Her eyes were liquid and blue—they were blue. Annie’s brain, sluggish now, took valuable seconds to appreciate this.

  Tawna Maydew was a fast-moving one.

  Tawna Maydew was alive.

  The fact that it did not matter, mattered. Annie folded her arms around Tawna. Her warm, pulsing meat, her hitching puffs of breath. Nothing had felt so good in a long time. Annie thought about biting and changing her, like a woman named Katrina Goteborg had bitten and changed her. She chose not to. Annie and Tawna could get no closer than this. Tar sealed their bodies, two into one.

  Annie believed she heard Tawna’s thoughts. Euphoria at their reunion. Gratitude their odysseys were complete. Happiness they were home. Or were those thoughts Annie’s? No longer could she tell the difference. No longer were there boundaries.

  As the sun rises higher, you realize the two of you are not alone. Over there is another you, and over here, another. You look and see yous to the left, and yous to right, and you can hear before, behind, and all around you, yous closing in, their cricking, cracking dead parts going silent in the ancient asphalt. The yous are not only two-legged. Yous come with four legs, and tails, and claws, and fangs, and snouts, and forked tongues, and pointy ears, and antlers, and horns, and fur, and scales. Finally, the yous with feathers drop in and bite off parts of you and you and you, and spirit them into the air to be scattered all around, so you will be planted everywhere. In time, you will grow back.

  You begin to sink. You share a thought, your last one. You have always been the living dead. You will always be. It was the coming of death that allowed you to live. The dead yous tried to teach this to the live yous for so long the dead yous had no choice but to begin shouting it. Now it is up to you, and you, and you—it is up to us, at last, to us—to remember, to rise up just like we in this pit sink down, to live among our living in peace, to die among our dead in harmony, for both states will persist, clinging to the other like shadows. We are not ghouls. We are not zombies. We are our own mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, sisters, and brothers. We have been waiting for us to accept us, to open arms for embraces. We are gone now, but we will be back. For now, the dead sink. For now, the dead die. For now, the dead win.

  Stay Scared: a Coauthor’s Note

  Lugosi always lived in a castle while the zombies went out to pick the sugarcane.

  George A. Romero, Film Comment 15, no. 3 (1977)

  It begins and ends with The Tales of Hoffmann. Not just the book you’re holding but possibly George Andrew Romero’s whole career and, by extension, my career too.

  George’s obsession with the 1951 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger film was so well documented that the Criterion Edition DVD features an interview with George, wherein he describes his unlikely and fortuitous viewing of the film at age twelve. If you haven’t seen the movie, I understand. Unlike George’s other avowed influences, like Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks’s The Thing from Another World or Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, it’s not horror, fantasy, or sci-fi. It is, rather, an adaptation of a Jacques Offenbach opera, itself adapted from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short stories.

  I suggest you see it for three reasons. One, it’s a stunning, phantasmagoric example of how a limited budget can provoke genius. Two, George and I would both argue that it is horror, and fantasy, and sci-fi too. Three, it’s the piece of art that made George Romero, as he says in the Criterion interview, “find out how to use the pencil”—and if you’re bothering to read this unusually long author’s note, that’s probably of interest.

  Nearly everyone believed George’s pencil was used exclusively in the service of film scripts. But he’d been speaking publicly about working on a novel as early as 1981, when Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine asked, “Is it true that you’re writing a novel yourself?”

  George’s response: “Yes.”

  Over the next thirty-six years, ancillary evidence suggests the idea of writing prose fiction rarely left his head. Until the 2017 short-story collection Nights of the Living Dead, edited by George and the indispensable Jonathan Maberry—which includes an earlier version of this novel’s opening—George’s only traditionally published piece of adult fiction, outside of novelization credits, was in a 1982 paperback anthology titled Modern Masters of Horror. The unnerving twenty-one-page story, “Clay,” is a knockout and exercises two of George’s recurrent themes: religious faith, primarily its futility; and humans’ inability to communicate.

  Two other offbeat pieces of fiction are worth mentioning. The first is a catalog, created for an art exhibition by George’s friend George Nama. Printed by Jack Rutberg Fine Arts shortl
y after Romero’s death, the catalog includes the fascinating, allegorical short story “Liberator,” which inspired the golem myth woven into The Living Dead.

  The second is a children’s book written and illustrated by George: The Little World of Humongo Bongo. Published in Belgium in 1996, it was inaccessible to English readers until a 2018 reprint by Canada’s ChiGraphic. This edition concludes with an interview, in which George, who hadn’t directed a movie in nine years, says, “I get sick and tired of trying to promote films.… It’s just pretty tiring, so I have been wanting to just write.” George’s lifelong frustration with Hollywood is evident not only in this quote but in lines from Humongo Bongo itself, like this one:

  “It was terrible to have your heart hardened.”

  Few lines George ever wrote spoke to me more personally; I lent the line to The Living Dead’s Karl Nishimura. You don’t have to be an artist to understand how gradually a person’s fire can be extinguished. Don’t get me wrong. Novel-writing is a business too (trust me on this), but your legs are swept from under you less frequently than in the movie biz. Just to ruin your day, here are only some of the film/TV projects George was attached to over the years:

  Apartment Living, The Assassination, Beauty Sleeping, Before I Wake, The Bell Witch, Black Gothic, Black Mariah, Carnivore, Cartoon, Chain Letter, City of the Dead, Cryptid, Cut Numbers, Deep Red, Diamond Dead, The Divine Spirit, Dracula, Empire of the Dead, Enemies, Expostulations, Figments, Flying Horses, The Footage, From a Buick 8, Funky Coven, Ghost Town, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Golem, Goosebumps, GPS, Gunperson, Hell Bent, Horror Anthology, The Ill, The Innocents, Invasion of the Spaghetti Monsters (a.k.a. Shoobee Doobee Moon), It, Jacaranda Joe, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Long Walk, Mannequin, Masque of the Red Death, Mickey B (Macbeth with robots), Midnight Show, Mongrel: The Legend of Copperhead, Moonshadows, The Mummy, Native Tongue, Night of the Living Dead: The Series, Orange Project, Pet Sematary, Phibes Resurrected, Phobophilia (a TV special for Penn & Teller), The Power, The Princeton Principle, The Raven, Resident Evil, Salem’s Lot, Scream of Fear, Seeing Things (a TV anthology based on the stories of Shirley Jackson), Sharing Joy & Sorrow, Shop Till You Drop … Dead, Solitary Isle, Something Outside, The Stand, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Tales of Hoffmann (as a space opera!), Tarzan of the Apes, Three at a Time, Trick ‘r Treat, Turn of the Screw, Tusk, Unholy Fire, Untitled George Romero Wrestling Project, Wake, War of the Worlds: The Night They Came, Whine of the Faun, Whiz Kid, The X-Files, The Zombie Autopsies, and Zomboid.

  It is no wonder, then, that a novel appealed to him. No one had to give him a green light. No one could force rewrites via a slashed budget. No one could make him cut his best effects to protect the sensibilities of a delicate populace. However, like thousands before him, he found finishing a novel to be grueling work. In the 1992 book Dark Visions: Conversations with the Masters of the Horror Film, George told Stanley Wiater, “I often thought about writing a novel, but then I realize what a commitment that is. Screenplays are in fact about one-third the size.”

  For a while, that seemed to be End of Story.

  Eighteen years later, in the Fall 2010 issue of VideoScope, at the end of an interview regarding Survival of the Dead, his final film, George states, so simply anyone might have missed it, “I have been working on a novel.”

  * * *

  When I heard about George’s death, I was visiting family in Virginia. The news came across my gadget, something George would have hated. I had to sit down. All I said, I think, was, “Oh no.” When I was asked what was wrong, I said, “George Romero died.” My sisters and father had sketchy ideas of the significance of this, but my wife, Amanda, understood right away.

  To say I grew up with George Romero is fanciful but true. The first film I actually recall watching is Night of the Living Dead. I must have been five or six. I saw it with my mom, Susan Laura Kraus, who had a penchant for fright flicks. It may sound like bad parenting, but was, in fact, the best parenting. As Night obsessives know, one of the film’s magical feats is how well it plays to different audiences. (How many films boast a stately Criterion Edition as well as two different RiffTrax versions?) Probably to ward off heebie-jeebies, my mom liked to laugh along to it, razzing the hapless Barbra and booing the cowardly Harry. Crazy though it seems, given the film’s plot, Night of the Living Dead became a safe space for me.

  It helped that the movie was always on. Skip this paragraph if this stuff is old hat. When the Walter Reade Organization, the film’s original distributor, changed the title from Night of the Flesh Eaters, it neglected to put the copyright bug on the title screen. That was all it took for Night to plop into the public domain. For George, this was both bad and good. The bad: he’d never make the millions he deserved. The good: because it required no rights payments to screen—and because it was really damn good—it was shown everywhere. If someone in a movie is watching a movie, odds are it’s Night, and my educated guess is that no movie in history has been released on VHS and DVD more often—many hundreds of times.

  By every logical measure, the colorized version put out by Hal Roach Studios in 1986 is an atrocity. But let’s get illogical. If you can find a VCR, watching the colorized VHS is the closest you can get to feeling how beat-up and put-upon the film had become. The “colors” are thin and sickly, like tattered flags, yet a nobility lurks in that analog sludge. It’s accidentally beautiful in the way of tenth-generation tapes traded by pre-internet movie buffs. Their ugliness proved how beloved they were, how hard people were willing to work to see them anew.

  It’s another of Night’s magical feats. The film was like the zombies it invented: overused and abused, but unwilling to die.

  Night barely feels like a movie to me. It’s more like an album I love; it’s part of my waking thoughts, my blood and oxygen. Hearing of George’s death reminded me, yet again, how much his stories felt like family stories, how much he felt like family. I engage in little fandom. My home is nearly devoid of media mementos. The one exception is George. The Night poster behind my writing desk. The weird piece of Creepshow fan art I bought the day George died. I keep three framed photos in my office: one of my wife and me, one of my mom, and one of George and me from the only time we ever met: March 6, 2006.

  * * *

  In January 2006, I read an article about George, probably about 2005’s Land of the Dead, in which George’s manager, Chris Roe, was thanked. This can’t be the same Chris Roe from my hometown, I thought. The idea was preposterous. I grew up in the hamlet of Fairfield, Iowa, not exactly a hotbed of Hollywood talent. But my memory of Chris was that he’d been interested in genre film and television. I scoured the internet for an email, wrote him, and days later, we caught up on the phone.

  Chris had indeed become a successful talent manager, and one of his clients was George Romero. I told Chris what a fan I was, and he suggested the three of us get together the next time he was near Chicago, where I lived.

  Three months later in Rosemont, Illinois, at Fangoria’s Weekend of Horrors, I met Chris in his hotel room, and soon after, George lumbered in from the adjoining room. He looked like George Romero, all right: roughly seventy stories tall, shrunk down to size only by his trademark oversized glasses. He wore his usual green vest, his hair in its usual white ponytail.

  He also looked like shit. He was sick. Sick enough, in fact, that he should have canceled the appearance. But he refused to; he took his fans seriously. Eleven years later, his wife, Suzanne Desrocher-Romero, would show me a notebook in which George practiced his signature prior to signing events so it would look all right despite his trembling hands. Regarding the kind of person George Romero was, there is no more poignant piece of evidence.

  The three of us had a nice chat, or as nice a chat you can have when the man of the hour can barely stand. George was interested in hearing about my novels, though he was more interested in the small-town history Chris and I shared. Soon, it was time for George’s event. Chris and I escorted him down t
he elevator and through the halls, serving as guards to keep signature hounds at bay. We stopped only once for George to buy cigarettes. It’s a painful detail. Eleven years later, he would die of lung cancer.

  That was it for eleven years. A month after George died, I received a call from Chris. We’d stayed in loose touch over the preceding decade, during which both our careers developed. By then, I was hard at work on my second collaboration with Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water. I was delighted to hear from Chris, but fully unprepared for the new kind of collaboration he proposed: completing the epic zombie novel George had left unfinished.

  There were more obvious choices. Authors more famous, authors known for zombie fiction. I’d circled the topic before, if obliquely. My Zebulon Finch duology features an undead protagonist, though he’s agile and debonair, about as far from a Romero shambler as it gets. In the second volume, I pay explicit homage to George, with Zebulon going mad in the Arizona desert and believing George Romero is sending him instructions via Night of the Living Dead, à la Charles Manson and The White Album. (The book also includes a conspiracy theory based on a detail in Night I’m convinced no one but me has noticed. Sorry, you’ll have to read the book.)

  After I recovered from the shock, I had no choice but to convince myself I might actually be up to the task. My interest had always lay in George Romero, not zombies per se. I knew from interviews George felt similarly. As grateful as he was for the undead that gave his career life, they forced him into the smallest of spaces, the same as they did Barbra and Ben. As the above list of unmade projects illustrates, he struggled to get anything else made, even in the realm of horror.